UK:Below you can find my peer reviewed publications related to new technologies, thinking/learning, and sketching techniques & practices. Because the goals and application areas of the research differ I have tried to organise them the best I can, but please use the abstracts for guidance. Click here for a list of other research publications.

Papers ON: Sketching on paper to boost thinking

Nørgaard, M. (2017) Can you picture this? Instructions for using sketchnotes to help novices improve their sketching skills,Proceedings of ICERI2017, November 16.-18., Sevilla, Spain.

ABSTRACT: In design related activities, sketching is a thinking tool next to writing, and sketches are often referred to as the language of designers. The ability to sketch out ideas rapidly in various formats is a central skill for a designer, and should be fostered in many educational programs. Besides design schools and schools for architecture, sketching is – for example – also a central skill for students of interaction design and experience design at a computer science faculty. For most of these students, however, sketching skills are far less developed than writing, and as a result, many students shy away from using sketching as the powerful tool it is for thinking, articulating and communicating ideas with their peers. This proves a great challenge for teachers at programs that rely on students being able to use the language of designers, but rarely provide them with any techniques to help them learn the trade. This paper concerns the use of sketchnotes as a means to train basic visual communication and drawing skills for students with next to no experience with drawing. Based on a practical experiment with 55 students it presents insights as to which central basic drawing skills significantly improves the students’ ability and motivation to use sketching as part of their design work. The paper presents valuable instructions for teaching, exercising and critiquing sketchnotes in class in order to train students’ sketching skills. Keywords: Sketching, design sketching, visualization, sketchnoting, re-framing, memory, design teaching, thinking tool, dialogue tool.

ABSTRACT: In design, sketching is a thinking tool next to writing, and sketches are often referred to as the language of designers. The ability to sketch out ideas rapidly in various formats is a central skill for a designer, and should be fostered in educational programmes. For most students, however, sketching skills seems far less developed than writing, and as a result, they often avoid communicating visually all together. This paper concerns the use of sketchnotes as a means to train basic visual communication and drawing skills. It presents a practical experiment with 55 students from IT product development at a computer science faculty who were involved in lectures, critique and open sketchnote assignments as part of their course in shape changing interfaces. The paper discusses insights related to how the different activities contributed to improving the students’ skills in making knowledge visual and engaging others with their drawings. The paper discusses outcomes related to the visual qualities such as the use of various types of contrasts and to the informational quality such as the level of abstraction in the drawings comprising a sketchnote. Finally, the paper relates these outcomes to the students’ journey towards becoming more confident sketchers.

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ABSTRACT: Based on a case from industry we describe the use of graphic facilitation to engage participants in workshops. With an outset in design sketching we describe and exemplify the use of graphic facilitation and reflect on its relevance for supporting a playful environment and the results on user participation in a professional learning situation. Further, we provide guidelines for practitioners on how to efficiently use graphic facilitation in situations where engagement, learning and reflection are of the essence. The guidelines include using a personal style of sketching, making large numbers of sketches directly in front of the audience in real time, and contextualizing learning points in humorous ways.

ABSTRACT: Whether planned in detail or developing almost accidentally, all businesses have a model for how to turn raw materials or services into revenue, including how products are channelled to customers, and how the business interacts with partners. Business schools worldwide teach how to develop and optimize business models, but not all business owners have gone to business school. In terms of business model development, small creative businesses owned by for example a single artisan face special challenges compared to traditional businesses. One crucial difference between the two is that creative workers are motivated by the outlook of self-fulfilment and not profit, and this means that owners of small creative businesses are unlikely to invest time and money in strategic business development. Based on an four-hour long experiment with a self employed jewellery designer this article reports on using live provocative sketching as an aid to develop creative business models together with the owners. The experiment suggests that the particular combination of live visual sketching and provocation can push reflection on business development, and help make work values clear to the business owner, who gains a better understanding of the dynamics of his or her business potential, and which may prove a valuable outset for further business thinking.

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Mitchell, R. & Nørgaard, M. (2011), DIY Cartoon Storyboards, live sketching and co-sketching to involve young and old users in participatory design. 4th World Conference on Design Research, IASDR2011, October 31 – November 4, Delft, the Netherlands.

ABSTRACT: This paper presents and discusses results from two cases, where various sketching techniques including DIY cartoon storyboards, live sketching and co-sketching, were used to provoke young and older users to think about new designs and design qualities, and to help designers evaluate and investigate these ideas together with users. Results suggest that both amateur and expert sketching can provoke and support valuable evaluation and generation of design concepts. We conclude with presenting recommendations for the use of sketching activities in participatory design.

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ABSTRACT: This position paper describes how to use tinkering thinking to help form creative communities comprising children with disabilities and their families. The pedagogical goals of such workshop activities is to boost both children and parents’ sense of self-mastery and empower them to look at mundane life challenges differently, think differently about what can be done about them, and by whom. The strategic goal is to form a community that will sprout truly user centered ideas and eventually inspire new businesses within ITproducts and services.

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ABSTRACT: In this paper we describe the outcomes from a design exercise in which eight groups of designers designed and built hardware sketches in the form of playful shapechanging prototypes, generatively working with Rasmussen et al’s [31] eight unique types of shape change. Seeing that shape-changing interfaces is a growing area in HCI design research and that authors often shy away from articulating the special qualities brought to a design by using changing shape to communicate information, we set out to explore shape changing interfaces through a series of sketching experiments through the support of Danish toy company. Eight design groups redesigned existing tumbling objects for children using electronic sensors and actuators guided only by the request to adhere to the client’s design goal to inspire imagination and movement in users. The main contributions of the paper include indications for the further expansion of the design space of shape changing interfaces relating to the perception and understanding of behaviour, causality and the mechanics involved in shape change events, which we call “Imagined Physics.” This concept is described along with additional insights into the qualities of shape changing interfaces coined in recent research in the field.

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ABSTRACT: This paper presents our experiences introducing, developing, and teaching master and bachelor level design courses at a Danish computer science faculty with the central aims of fostering creativity and maturing the students’ abilities to engage in professional discussions about design and design choices. Reflections on our efforts in previous courses provide examples of didactic choices we have made to facilitate the meeting of these goals including iterative experimentation, experience prototyping, and a host of sketching techniques. In the second part of the paper, we reflect on a new seven-week master’s course focused on the design of shape changing interfaces in the form of a chronological journey description focused on the progress and challenges for teachers and students. Conclusions in the form of lessons learned and future refinements are provided, which may be of interest to others who develop and teach courses in creative topics.

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CONTRIBUTION: In the field of cognitive robotics, much attention has focused on the technical challenges and approaches to building social robots and intelligent agents. However, few works explore how the aesthetic qualities of shape change influence how people perceive such an agent. Our contribution to this book focuses on the human responses to objects that change shape in response to input from users, environment, or other circumstances. In this chapter we discuss the term imagined physics, meaning how actuated devices are in one sense tied to their physical form, yet through the use of actuators, sensors, and computer algorithms can behave in ways that are surprising, unpredictable and that might even be perceived as magical. We also claim that shape change can help reveal the state of a robot or object, providing cues for mentalizing, similar to how we read emotions and understand body posture and other non-verbal communication when interacting with people. We review examples of shape-changing interfaces including toys, interactive lights, robots, etc, noting the intentions – or claims about intent – made by the respective designers.